Wednesday, 30 April 2014

It is odd that a French Catholic
Archbishop fled from anti-clerical persecution in revolutionary France to take
up residence in Protestant England. Even odder that he came from a notorious
family of Jacobites who were close to the exiled Old and Young Pretenders. In
1806 The London Review reported the death on 5 July “at his house in George Street, Portman
Square, [of] Arthur Richard Dillon, archbishop and duke of Narbonne, primate of
the Gauls, president of the states of Languedoc, and commander of the order of
the Holy Ghost.” Archbishop Dillon had
been living in exile for 15 years. With no official Catholic cemetery to bury
him in he was interred in St Pancras burial ground which had become the
favoured final resting place for the dead émigré community.

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Arthur Richard Dillon, a portrait in the Narbonne archives

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The
Archbishop was the youngest of the five sons of Arthur Dillon of Roscommon and Catherine
Sheldon who was from a prominent English Jacobite family. Arthur the father was
a Jacobite General who had been forced into French exile at the age of 21
following the defeat of the Irish Jacobites at Limerick by William of Orange. In
France he became a Maréchal de camp in the French army and encouraged his sons
to follow him into the military. Arthur Richard, as the youngest, was the token
clergymen. He became Bishop of Evreux by the age of 32 and Archbishop of
Toulouse by 37. He was what is euphemistically known as a ‘worldly prelate’. In
public terms this meant he was far more interested in temporal matters like
public works than spiritual ones. He was keen on engineering and sponsored
various bridges, canals, and harbours within his diocese as well as creating chairs
of chemistry and physics at Montpellier and Toulouse Universities.

In
his private life the Archbishop was devoted to the hunt, financially
extravagant and, by all accounts, the lover of his widowed niece Madame de
Roche (his sister’s daughter). The celebrated memoirist of the ancient regime,
Lucie de La Tour du Pin, was the granddaughter of Madame de Roche and great
niece of the Archbishop. Her memoirs paint a vivid portrait of life in her
grandmother’s houses; the hotel de Roche in the Faubourg St-Germain and the Château
Hautefontaine. Lucie noted that her great uncle had lived with her grandmother
“for twenty years without paying a sou of rent to his niece” and commented that “the
archbishopric of Narbonne, which paid him 250,000 francs a year, he had an
abbey which was worth 110,000; still another which was worth 90,000; and he
received an allowance of more than 50,000 francs for giving dinners every day
during the meetings of the States. It would seem that with such an income he
should have been able to live honourably and at his ease, but nevertheless he
was always in financial difficulties.” She also remarked that he spent as little
time as possible on his official duties in the provinces, preferring to return
as quickly as possible to the Faubourg St-Germain “in order to live en grand seigneur
at Paris and as a courtier at Versailles.” Lucie passed discretely over the
exact state of relations between the Archbishop and her grandmother but did say
that he was “dominated and influenced” by her and even that he “feared my
grandmother too much.”

Following
the revolution the Archbishop fled France and the guillotine with his niece and
in 1792 took up residence in London in a series of relatively modest rented
houses until his death in 1806. His body lay undisturbed through the first set of exhumations from St Pancras when a large part of the burial ground was taken
over by the Midland Railway Company for the mainline into St Pancras. He was
not so lucky in 2006 when a team of archaeologists working for the firms
Giffords and Pre-Construct were given a year to exhume 1,500 bodies that were
buried in the way of a proposed Channel Tunnel Rail Link platform. The
Archbishop was discovered inside a lead lined and lavishly engraved coffin.
Sitting securely in his skull was a pair of almost perfectly preserved Sèvres porcelain
false teeth complete with gold springs. The dentures were of exceptional
quality and are believed to be the work of the Parisian dentist Nicolas Dubois de Chémant. The Archbishop’s remains
were sent briefly to East Finchley Cemetery before arrangements were made to
repatriate them to France. In 2007 the Archbishop was reinterred, with great
ceremony, in the Narbonne Cathedral. His dentures however remained in England. They
were put on public display on World Smile Day in October 2006 at the Museum of
London. In 2008 they found a permanent home in the Cobbe Museum.